Honolulu, Hawaii has decided to take a stab at drastically reducing homelessness and it certainly goes beyond conventional means. If your interest is peaked on how, let us be amongst the first to introduce you to this innovative and altruistic movement.

The city of Honolulu has partnered with an architectural firm, 70 International, in an initiative to turn old city buses into homeless shelters. If their revolutionary initiative is successful, they may have just come up with a tangible way to combat homelessness through recycling accessible resources: city lifts. Simply brilliant!

Having received immense pressure over the past year for not doing enough about this growing social issue on the island of Oahu, Jun Yang, the city’s executive director of housing, has presented the ingenious idea to retrofit retired metro lifts as transitional housing for those human beings that find themselves without a home.

The buses will serve a variety of purposes from living spaces with beds and showers, to recreational spaces. May Ry Kim of 70 international, told Hawaii news that the design “is based on the premise that you could walk into a hardware store, buy everything you need in one go and build everything with no trade skills.” The premise would allow virtually anyone, even a team of untrained volunteers, to effectively contribute to the movement. An astonishing 70 buses and all of the materials required for renovations will be donated. LIFT, the volunteer organization helping to execute the project, hopes to build 2 buses by the end of this summer.

Now this is what we consider to be real work. We all have the ability to make a difference and help one another out. Even if we don’t have the means financially to give, we can donate our ideas and time into figuring out how to rid the world of the social ills that plague us.